


Gifts

by AreYouReady



Category: LE CARRE John - Works, Smiley's People - John Le Carré, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - John Le Carré
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, F/M, Gen, Homophobia, I guess???, M/M, Pre-Slash, Subtext, also it contains spoilers for smiley's people, but whos counting, casual torture references, everyone in the room is a self hating gay spy and its the sixties, i wouldnt call it pre-slash per se but uhhhhh, this is basically JUST ttss fic but it does reference the events of call for the dead, warning for... karla is a shitty person, well to nitpick its the fifties sixties AND seventies, what do you expect
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-22
Updated: 2018-05-22
Packaged: 2019-05-10 06:35:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14731791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AreYouReady/pseuds/AreYouReady
Summary: He had watched the course of Smiley’s career with interest - through the jealous eyes of Bill Haydon - and he had come to respect the man.





	Gifts

**Author's Note:**

> Dedicated to PegasusWrites who both inspired me while I was writing and beta'd me when I was done. 
> 
> This piece does not have anything to do with my other TTSS fic "You Long For What Chokes You" seeing as they're both canon-compliant and don't... really involve the same perspectives, but it's thematically similar if that makes sense.
> 
> This fic has a couple of references to adaptations of TTSS. The first is a nod to the one good piece of George characterization in the awful 2011 movie, and the second is the fact that in the BBC radio drama, he has Bill's corpse /extradited to Russia/.

“And now, your favorite part.” The voice dripped with derision. The tinny quality of the recording made it more nasal - or, perhaps, it had simply grown more nasal with age. These past six months, when Haydon - in Karla’s opinion, nigh-suicidally - began insisting on sending voice recorded “presents” instead of written reports with his rolls of film, were the first time in twenty years Karla had actually heard him speak.

He remembered now why he disliked it.

“How is  _ Smiley  _ doing?” Haydon asked the rhetorical question with a nonchalant annoyance that crawled under Karla’s skin. He glared around at the gray walls of the tiny, soundproof cubicle, and cupped his left hand tightly around the headphone at his ear. The pair was slightly broken on the left side, and a tiny piece of metal dug into his earlobe. Karla could have a better set, and all of his colleagues knew it. He kept this one to make sure his more profligate comrades remembered to be ashamed of themselves.

“Well, a little bird told me that he was seen crying in the rain like a good repressed English boy the other day, which I’m sure will warm your black little heart. Though I must say, I doubt it was your doing. Control’s busy dying, and that’s putting him more out of sorts than any dalliance I might have with Ann ever could, as I keep telling you. I don’t know why you want me to keep fucking my cousin, gorgeous as she may be.” Karla pursed his lips. Haydon could not possibly understand Smiley’s deep anger and sadness at the state of his marriage. All of Haydon’s emotions were surface level - he had more in common with Smiley’s woman than he did with Smiley himself.

“More importantly, he’s stopped sniffing around for traitors.” Haydon’s voice was no longer playful and snarky. “I think they shut him down at the top - not Control, Whitehall. Half an internal memo got tossed on the Witchcraft giveaway pile, it should be coming with the next set of photographs. Alleline is so stupid he’s mixing real gold with his chicken feed without my help. Control is still shutting Smiley out, thank God - it’s too late now, but we should have framed old George for my crimes, that  _ really  _ would have destroyed the Circus.” Karla chewed the inside of his cheek, and lit himself another cigarette.

“Control is still giving Smiley busywork, flying him all over Europe and all that. Do you still have his lighter, by the by? Is that some kind of sex thing? I know you think Smiley is-” Karla switched the recording off. He tasted blood in his mouth - just a drop. He would finish this… later. Surely Haydon would have some  _ useful  _ details in the remainder of his report about Smiley’s activities. For now, Karla would act on the other, better information he’d gotten earlier. He had a budding network in Latvia to turn around.

\---

The lighter glinted in the dim, sourceless illumination of his cell. The groans of other inmates, and the crush of bodies pressed in on Karla, but the almost imperceptible gold shine of the lighter seemed to stand alone. The overpowering heat made it hard to recall the cold of Siberia, and he worried that once he was home to Moscow, he might go mad with the reality of it. His hands clutched the pack of Camels harder than he wanted them to, but he could not light one. He would return, and he would destroy Rudnev before Rudnev could destroy him, except…

Karla shuddered as he thought about muzzle flash. He’d lost count of the number of internal executions he’d been present for, and now... In the back of his mind Smiley’s words played over and over again:  _ “You have a wife, don’t you? Do you know where she is? We can take care of her. Surely she wouldn’t like to see you shot?”  _

There was nothing  _ they  _ could do for Tanechka. If Karla were to defect, she would be trapped. Worse, she would be discovered, and punished for his crimes. He would succeed. 

In Siberia, the first time, he had prepared himself to die. He had found in himself a state of mind that was empty of everything: love, hate, or ideology. It was a cleaner, purer way of being. He had found that pain could not touch him there. As his star had risen, he had strengthened it with the knowledge that each step toward ultimate power could be his last. 

Even when he had committed his greatest sin against good tradecraft, when he had fathered a child, the part of him that cared for her was sealed away in a glass box. He knew - in an abstract sense - that he would do anything for her, destroy himself, destroy everything he believed in. But that knowledge was far away. He was a calm, rational ghost in his own mind. He was already dead.

But Smiley had shaken him. He had watched the course of Smiley’s career with interest - through the jealous eyes of Bill Haydon - and he had come to respect the man. He saw in Smiley the kind of calm, quiet competence that, were espionage a game, he would like to see in an opponent. Beneath gross layers of bourgeois pretense, through false starts and fits of conscience, Smiley was as relentless as any good comrade. 

Only Smiley had seemed so small, sweating through his shirt across that tiny table. So small and so… fragile. His emotions were more  _ real _ , perhaps, than Karla had ever seen, from anyone at all. As he watched Smiley desperately search for catharsis in him, there was a part of him that reached out. As he stared at Smiley’s token, glinting in his hands, Karla was afraid of death for the first time in years. Not just for his daughter’s sake. Not for the Party’s sake. For his own.

He flicked the lighter on, and watched the flame dance. Then he shut the lid, extinguishing it. He was strong. He would destroy Smiley for this. He would take the thing that made Smiley so fascinating, and extinguish him with it. 

He would survive, for that.

\---

Haydon’s “nigh-suicidal” recorded voice messages ended when they sent Prideaux to Czechoslovakia. 

The last one was one word, repeated over and over.

_ “Bastard.” _

\---

Karla exhaled slowly. He wanted to sneeze, but refused to do so until he had an alibi that was not  _ “Haydon’s brand of cigarettes produce a uniquely unpleasant aroma.” _ He took a drag on his own instead.

“ _ He  _ likes  _ Smiley  _ better now, you know.” Haydon’s mop of fair, gently curling hair was slick with sweat. He was in his cups. “Smiley moved in the office next to him. And  _ he  _ has designs on C, as well, once we get rid of bloody Maston. I wonder what he’ll call himself when he gets there, maybe he’ll just introduce himself as C, would be bloody typical.” Haydon snatched the cigarette from between Karla’s lips, and sucked on it along with his own, finally inhaling a significantly thicker cloud of smoke that somehow smelled worse than Haydon’s brand alone. Karla stiffened and relaxed the muscles of his left hand under the table, and lit himself another.

“And George Smiley! Oh, I’ve worked with Smiley. He’s not bad, not by any means. If you need detail work, George is your man. But he has no  _ style.  _ How Ann married him at all I will never understand, I’d be shocked if he could even get it up. Thank god she fucked off to Cuba, for her sake.” Haydon looked at Karla, his eyes sparkling. He grabbed Karla’s hands in both of his. “And his quivering little ‘conscience!’ You know he quits the bloody Circus once a year and tells us all he’s going to go back to teaching? Blinks at us like a fucking turtle and tells us that the work we do is ‘necessary, but repugnant’?” When quoting Smiley, Haydon’s voice went lower, and took on a mocking, dopey quality. He was still clutching Karla’s hands. Karla was aware that Haydon’s sexual appetites, like the rest of him, were dangerously bourgeois. Perhaps this was why he so insisted on touching Karla. “What fucking conscience does he have when all of Britain is America’s whore? George is smart. He knows the times we live in. So why isn’t he  _ doing  _ anything about it?”

“And  _ that man  _ picks an aging, fat, sexless frog to be his little  _ confidante,  _ over me. Me!” Karla resisted the urge to point out that Smiley, like Haydon, was in his thirties. Haydon was too busy gesticulating to even notice the moment of indecision on Karla’s face. By the time Haydon looked back at him, he’d schooled his features back to soft and sympathetic. “George doesn’t even know what queen and fucking country means, he’d rather be a fucking Kraut. Spying is his third job, after moral philosopher and  _ aspiring bloody German! _ ” Haydon was shouting, now.

“Don’t think that you own me, Herr  _ Klein _ .” He dropped Karla’s hands suddenly, as though they disgusted him. “I’m a loyal fucking citizen. I love my queen, even if she will be removed in the coming fucking revolution, and I love my  _ fucking  _ country, you hear me?” Karla nodded. “Do you? Do you? Do you hear me through all of your German codenames and fake Swiss accents and American  _ fucking  _ cigarettes? _ I love my fucking country! _ ” Haydon’s gaze fell, and he bit his lip. 

“That’s why I’m doing this.” Haydon’s voice was suddenly soft, pleading. “That’s why I’m giving you…  _ this. _ ” He gestured vaguely at some imaginary gift of intelligence on the table, a stand in for the slim, precious folder sitting safely in Karla’s hideaway box, a hundred kilometers away. 

“We beat the fucking Nazis now, and there’s nothing to keep it together anymore.” Haydon closed his eyes, and did not elaborate on what “it” was. “The fucking Americans own us, Klein. Even our secrets. They even own our secrets.” He looked at Karla again, imploring him for some kind of… comfort? 

\---

As it was lowered into the ground, Karla gave the coffin a grim smile. It was bad quality, and made on English soil. Unsuitable for the state funeral its occupant had implicitly been promised. A good thing, then, that both services had agreed that too much publicity would not be… convenient.

Haydon had probably left a pretty corpse. He would have at any age. Karla considered the mental image of Haydon’s face, worm-eaten and bloated with rot, and grimaced. 

Then he smiled. Smiley had demonstrated a dramatic streak Karla had not thought him capable of. Until now, Smiley’s every move that Karla had observed had been defined by a humility that Karla was forced to respect. But the extravagant pettiness of Smiley’s gift to all of the Soviet Union (and thus to Karla, and Karla alone)... It showed a certain flair that was almost  _ Haydonesque.  _

\---

Karla turned the lighter between his fingers as semi-lucid eyes followed him from Prideaux’s bloodied, broken face. He grinned. Smiley would enjoy this little  _ gift,  _ a buried treasure that he would find if (when) he began his hunt again. Karla opened his mouth to speak.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Anyway, someday can I get a fuckin uhhhhhh smarla fic idea that is a) explicitly romantic instead of just Big Subtext and b) does not somehow get taken over by? Bill Haydon????


End file.
